Digital marketing has now become a little less than rocket science and the marketers have to deal with a lot of new technologies and disruptive changes while bringing in new customers at a high ROI. This requires the use of right technologies and tools that can help marketers react to change quickly and generate better results each time. In an earlier blog article, we had discussed tag management, its importance, and some general benefits it offers to IT experts, analytics teams, and marketing managers. Tags are an essential part of any digital marketer’s life as they have to be implemented and managed for all kinds of software packages used for digital analytics, personalization, retargeting, affiliate marketing, and so on. 87 percent of digital marketers believe that tag management is key to their online success (source: eMarketer). In this blog, we would like to explore some practical benefits that tag management can bring, especially for the modern digital marketer.

Build your own marketing cloud (BYOMC)

The next step after implementing a tag management solution is to build a data layer. A data layer acts like a middle platform that connects the multiple application layers (applications of solutions that you use on your site that require tags) with the experience layers (the places where your users interact with your digital footprints). A well-defined data layer can become a unifying road map for how you engage with your users. It acts as a common dictionary for all your digital marketing applications and brings them all together so that you can synchronize data among your different software packages, even when those packages don’t connect with each other directly.

Explore new insights

Marketers can leverage the data layer that has seemingly disconnected streams of data flowing through it to bring out fresh ideas. Using the power of advanced tag management systems or marketing cloud solutions you can tap into this data to generate new, correlated insights. This will enable you to make your varied marketing and software applications work in complete synchronization so that you can connect the dots between the visitors and their multi-device profiles and get a step closer to becoming truly omnichannel. You can also identify ways for better personalization through this.

Boost the speed of running marketing campaigns

Due to minimal or no dependency on IT team for running or implementing tags for marketing campaigns, the whole process becomes extremely fast. Over 80% of marketers feel that their speed of running digital marketing campaigns has increased with the use of tag management solutions. With the use of tag management solutions, digital marketers can launch campaigns effectively, optimize results faster, test options quickly, and change code instantly when needed.

Optimize and enhance

Digital marketers get the ability to track the actual progress and performance metrics of their marketing campaigns and this enables better and faster optimization. Over 33 percent digital marketers believe that tag management improves campaign ROI, increases revenues, and improves optimization during campaigns. With the use of tag management systems, all unnecessary or broken tags that pull-down your website’s performance are removed and are replaced with well-managed tags that can be edited with ease whenever needed. This will have a positive impact on customer satisfaction as well as conversions.

Segmentation and personalization

Effective tag management allows you to integrate and correlate the data from varied marketing applications that were working independently of each other in the past. Through this common data layer, marketers can more accurately create customer profiles and generate better customer engagement strategies. As customers move from one touch point to the other, all the data gets recorded in this common data layer and can be leveraged for developing deeper customer profiles that can be used for better segmentation and personalization. Insights from one channel can be used to enrich the other channels as well.

Increase website privacy

Customers deem their right to privacy as very important. If they do not wish for you to track their moves, then you must comply as there are many different laws in different countries related to digital privacy. Tag management solutions make this process way simpler for website owners as privacy compliance is usually built into the solution. So, if you want to make sure that your website follows global privacy laws or those of various countries, you can utilize the tag management solution to do so. Even if the different software package vendors do not comply with these laws, you can still maintain your compliance as you can centrally control the tags and data given by the vendors. You can even allow your customers to select their own privacy settings.

More experimentation

Tag management solutions allow digital marketers to not only conduct A/B or multivariate tests on their digital properties but also tag them to measure the results accurately. According to the e-marketer study, the experimentation as a result of tag management solutions has increased by 17%. Another key feature is that the tag management solutions allow marketers to make real-time changes and hence they can course correct their marketing strategies with ease and agility never experienced before.

Tag management for mobile

Although the use of tag management for mobile websites is a less now, but the number is growing as we move on ahead in the year. In Jan 2015, 55 percent digital marketers in North America achieved somewhat positive effect, while 21 percent achieved a very positive effect with the use of mobile tagging. As the smartphone usage levels increase, marketers are left with no choice but to know how consumers use the medium and optimize the engagement further to increase customer satisfaction; and tag management for mobile will play a crucial role in this space.

Select better vendors

How do you select vendors for various marketing functions of your website? The usual process is that IT teams get involved and they try out different vendors by creating scripts that serve tags to different pages to that results can be measured. Or you select the vendor based on your gut-feel or testimonials (now that’s not something you should do). A great feature of tag management solutions is that you can easily create split segmentation for different service providers quickly and start capturing comparative results in real-time. This will clearly show the quantitative performance levels of different tools and applications. Now, that’s something a modern marketer must do – base decisions on facts and numbers to opt for the right vendors.

Reduce digital marketing costs

Isn’t cost something you are most concerned about? Most digital marketers face the biggest challenge of how to allocate marketing budgets effectively. Also, companies do not want to waste precious IT resources and their valuable time in something as mundane as manual tag management. Tag management solutions can help you measure the performance of each of your marketing assets and also let you manage your tags independently, freeing up the IT resources. A recent study on ROI of Tag Management states that “73 percent of respondents feel that using a TMS is more cost-effective and 45 percent say that it is significantly less expensive than manually tagging.”

To conclude

Why did we write this article? Having worked with hundreds of companies in the digital domain, we have realized that despite the very evident benefits offered by tag management solutions, the number of companies utilizing it effectively is still very low. But the good news is that the adoption rate is seeing a positive swing with the launch of advanced tag management solutions. Companies are pleased with the fact that the tag management tool becomes a transparent marketing middleware that acts as a common communication platform for marketers, IT teams, and solution vendors. It makes the whole process faster, visible and more lucrative for all the stakeholders involved.